Three films about…animals: Angry Birds (2016), Cats (2019) and Pet Sematary (2019)

Why am I writing about these movies now?

Well, I’m moving my back catalogue of movie (and occasionally TV) reviews from another site to Medium — covering many of the best-known releases of the last decade, as well as more obscure fare. To make it a bit more fun, I’ll be grouping them thematically (as here), but unless I spot actual errors I’m not doing any editing…so my opinion may have changed since I first wrote them!

My reviews of new cinema, streaming and disc releases, as well as retrospectives on old (and not-so-old) classics, will mostly continue to appear on the Medium publication Frame Rated.

Anyway, here goes. Enjoy…

Angry Birds

Angry Birds is a very odd film. A thin, colourful and somewhat meandering tale of the birds from the hit smartphone game, it does have kid appeal in a slapstick way — we went with an eight-year-old who is not particularly a gamer, who I imagine would rate it as fair-to-middling — and even provides mild adult appeal through a few slightly lame gags. (There is one momentary, hilarious reference to The Shining.)

But it is impossible to escape a persistent if rather unfocused political flavour to it — vaguely Tea Partyish, and appropriately more…